CHSPR Seminar | Laying the Foundations for Developing a Disease-specific Comorbidity Index A Journey through Challenges, Decisions, and Next Steps

Speaker: Hanna Frank, PhD Student, UBC School of Population and Public Health

Comorbidity indices are integral to epidemiological research; however, existing tools — such as the widely used Charlson index — were originally developed for general in-hospital populations and focused on predicting outcomes relevant to those settings. These indices may lack relevance for specific disease groups, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), with unique comorbidity profiles and disease progression patterns, underscoring the need for a tailored approach. This talk will offer insights applicable to comorbidity score development in diverse disease contexts by delving into the methodology behind creating an MS-specific comorbidity index, from selecting key comorbidities and evaluating conventional indices in the MS setting, to the next steps of developing and internally and externally validating the measure in BC, Manitoba, and Sweden.

Hanna Frank is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr Ehsan Karim at SPPH. She has a background in mathematics, statistics, and computer science, and her research interests focus on the use of data science in health care, particularly in developing predictive modeling tools for clinical settings and advancing machine learning applications in health care.